2020: YEAR OF THE EXPERT

Don't know about you, but I'm starting to lose my faith in "experts."

Seems to me, the folks who own the information infrastructure, ie the billionaire class, pick and choose the "experts" they want you to heed. Needless to say, those are inevitably the "experts" who happen to push the interests of their paymasters.

This most obvious observation is today dismissed as a "conspiracy theory."

You can find experts with a list of credentials longer than your arm to take any side of any issue. There's certainly no shortage of experts in this world. 

Experts, especially the ones who are cultivating careers as "experts" on FoxCNNMSNBCetc, are in it for the money. Once a research scientist takes a government post, their science is by definition politicized. Yet we treat the "experts" who stand in front of the cameras with a totally unwarranted deference. 

To our peril.

Puppy make poo-poo... GOOD BOY!

It's crazy how fast you revert to baby-talk when you get a puppy.

Puppy go poo-poo... as if having a shit is a noteworthy endeavour. And I guess it is if you're a one year old... or a one year old Italian mastiff puppy.

For the puppy, it's nice when they take their shit outside. Bruno has been decorating the yard with his poo-piles for almost two weeks now. It'll be just great when the great unveiling comes in the spring, when all the snow melts and you realize the scale of a winter's worth of dogshit on your lawn.

So, overall I'd say there's a pretty shitty prognosis for the whole dog thing.

But then again, you won't get the love if you can't take the shit.

Lord willing... if the creek don't rise and the Covid don't get ya

I've always had trouble acting my age, and it was a complete shock to find myself at an age where I found myself gently nudged into retirement.

So you can imagine that when I look at Covid stats that tell me some 95% of Covid deaths are folks 65 and over, I pay attention.

After all, I don't want to be the guy who dismissed the pandemic and then dies from it. That would just give too many people the last laugh.

I'm taking what you might call a "fatalist" approach, as in, if my number comes up it comes up. Nothing I'm gonna do about it. Let's face it; there's going to be a cause of death on that death certificate, and I'll be just as dead if the certificate says Covid or says something else.

Which is why I have grave reservations about our lockdown policies. Ya, lockdowns might save a few of us over-65s, but to what end? Some of us might get another twenty years, others just a few years, and the average Covid fatality, an 82 year old in a long term care home with multiple co-morbidities, might get a few months or weeks. 

At what cost?

Thousands of independent businesses gone forever, their trade absorbed by Walmart and Amazon.

Thousands of mom and pop restaurants gone (but don't worry. Mickey D hasn't skipped a beat.)

Millions of folks making ends meet with their low-wage jobs at those independent businesses thrown out of work, permanently. Millions of these people are facing eviction and bankruptcy.

And that's all worth it so we can add a few months to the lifespans of the elderly ill who are rotting away in under-staffed and under-funded care homes?

No thanks.

About the never-ending clown show in Washington

I see where Rubio is in the news for claiming that "elites are tricking you into taking vaccine," or something to that effect.

Remember, this was the leading "serious" establishment candidate for the leadership of the GOP before Trump upset the applecart.

Elites are tricking you into taking a vaccine? Alrighty then...

I mean, who am I to judge? Those elites are tricking us about all kinds of shit all the time, so there's nothing new here.

And what's going on with Sleepy Joe as he assembles his cabinet? 

Hmm... looks like he's putting together a team of true believers. True believers in American Exceptionalism. True believers in America's God-given mission to shape all nations into America's image.

What's that look like? I've refused to go see for myself since they made a passport a requirement to cross the border, to keep terrorists out or something. Well, fuck that. The Buffalo Sabres haven't got a penny from me since.

And just as well. From what I hear, see on the TV, read in the papers, and get from the personal accounts of folks who've had the pleasure of first-hand observation, the place is going down the shitter, and fast. The tent cities keep a-growing just as the fortunes of the billionaires keep a-growing even more!

It's as if the joint is run by retards.

Which is ironic, because it's actually run by lawyers (hence the infatuation with the cliche, "rule of law") who graduated from Harvard and Yale and sport the finest CVs in the land.

The ruling class now busying itself asset-stripping the USA may be a bunch of greedy, amoral, and vicious cunts, but they're very highly qualified and definitely not stupid.

Bruno Briefing: Week 1

Bruno has, as of yesterday, embarked on the second week at his new forever home here at Falling Downs.

We had a couple of potentially dangerous brain farts in week 1, where he'd randomly take a gallop down the middle of the road. This isn't a dog (yet) you can trust out of the house without supervision. He's a bit more of a house dog than I expected. More of a couch buddy than a walking buddy.

He's taken a couple of half-hearted runs at squirrels, but we have yet to hear him bark. He's quite the pussy, but he looks mean as hell. I've spent a few happy hours wrestling doggie toys out of his yap, and that's got to be the scariest mouth this side of a snapping turtle.

Every time he takes a drink out of his water dish, the aftermath looks like someone deliberately tossed a glass of water on the floor. When we hear the big slurps we immediately stand by with a towel. 

The longest walk I've manage to get him on took me to the top of the Burgess hill, about half a kilometre into my daily 5K. But, it's early days. I'm sure we'll build on that.

You can make bagels on your laptop

Ya, I know... get the fuck outta here neumann, I hear you mumble as you click on something else. But I'm not making this up. 

Check this out.   

I'm new to retirement, and I gotta say it's getting kinda old. I mean, planning which room you're going to paint next, and what colour, well... what can I say?

What I can say is that ain't gonna be my "golden years." And while I do have some longish-term plans, in the short term I feel I need to do something just to get out of my retirement rut, which has devolved into an orgy of beer-swilling, pot-smoking, blog-spewing nihilism. 

Or something like that. 

So I went to the Canada Job Bank to see what kind of employment opportunities might be out there, and what the heck, I find this "baker's helper" job posted by Kettlemans, an Ottawa bagel outfit. It's a long way from Owen Sound to Ottawa, but, thank goodness, this is a "virtual" job.

Virtual jobs are a new category that the folks at Canada Job Bank invented since the rise of covid. Virtual jobs are jobs you can do from lockdown over the internet!

Perfect!

As regular readers will know, I've been a fan of bagel making since my old pal Amanda Robinovich was trying to get her bagel joint off the ground down in Maryland a few years ago. (footnote: Amanda's bagel emporium was burned to the ground again in the George Floyd riots last summer, and she finally pulled the plug. Once I learn how to make virtual laptop bagels I'll reach out to her.)

I'll be giving Kettlemans a call Monday morning. I'm keen to get in on the ground floor of over-the-internet bagel-making.

The only problem is, if I get a job making internet bagels, it doesn't get me out of the house...

Have a Merry Covid Christmas!

Today is the day we ostensibly honour the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. By what I remember from Sunday School, he was a mellow dude who encouraged his followers to be kind to the less fortunate, to eschew conflict, turn the other cheek, and so forth. The Jewish fringe cult he founded "went viral," as we would say today, and eventually evolved into "Christianity," the more-or-less official religion of the Nations of Virtue, and especially of the USA.

I'm pretty sure if the guy who delivered the Sermon on the Mount came back today, he wouldn't recognise the Christianity of men like Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo or Tony Blair, just to choose three high-profile names who profess to be followers of the Prince of Peace.

While everyone in America is riveted by the duelling dumpster fires of covid and Trump, nobody seems to care what America is doing in the rest of the world while this shit show is going on. 

In country after country America has been using its enormous economic clout, which is backed by what is by far the most expensive military in the world, to bully weaker nations in this time of global pandemic. Rest assured this is a fully bipartisan initiative. Democrats and Republicans can't agree on whether $600 or $2000 will tide you over while the virus runs its course, but they're in full agreement that this is a great time to further tighten the screws on people living in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and anywhere else that folks would prefer not to be governed by Washington. 

Those sanctions have real consequences, especially among the poorest in the target countries. They cause more suffering to people who are already suffering, in the cynical expectation that if they suffer enough they will rise up and overthrow their government, making room for a US-approved stooge who will allow Washington to call the shots. These policies come from a Secretary of State who claims to be a devout follower of that mellow dude on the mountain.

This Christmas, let's think about what kind of foreign policy Jesus would have.

 

Dog=Joy

We've been getting to know Bruno, and he's been getting to know us.

He's rather more shy than he looks. He's learning a lot of new stuff. He showed up here after a week at the rescue shelter. Before that, he spent most of his time in a crate in someone's basement in town. Unlike every previous hound we've had, he's not a fan of car rides. 

He's a gentle beast. I was leery of getting a male, because they can be aggressive. Last male I had, a beautiful Alsatian named Buddy, would still be trying to chase the porcupine up the tree even after he had a hundred quills in his face. He was actually a German Shepherd, but my elderly Jewish neighbour at the time couldn't make the word "German" come out of her mouth, and since I otherwise quite enjoyed her as a neighbour, we kind of reached an unspoken agreement that both Buddy and I were Alsatians.

He loves to job-shadow the Farm Manager as she goes about her cooking voodoo. He's a very attentive student and will become a famous chef someday, I'm sure. 

I had him out on the stoop just before I sat down to write this. It's just getting dark, and the coyote choir was conducting a rehearsal. You'll hear an eruption of yip-yapping from the ridge to the south, and it will be answered, call-and-return style, with a chorus of yip-yapping and kye-eyeing from the ridge to the north. 

Then neighbourhood dogs join in the action. There's a couple of Shepherds just east of us, a couple of Aussie Shepherds half a mile to the north, and a Lab just to the west. Often the dogs will keep talking to one another even after the coyotes have finished their rehearsal. We've had dogs who sing along, but so far Bruno is content to just take it all in. 

I've taken him on a couple of short walks, and hope to build up to my normal 5k over the next week or so. He shows no interest whatsoever in passing vehicles, which is a happy thing. He did however take off after a dude who jogged by in the dark last night. That in itself is highly unusual. In the first place, nobody jogs by here, period. And in December, in the dark? Anyway, I didn't even see the guy till Bruno rocketed off the porch in a great display of athleticism. Then I hear a panicked voice, "does he bite?"

Well, he didn't, and I can't imagine he would. He's the best thing that's happened around here all of 2020.

On the downside, Doublewide, the barn cat who made good, will never forgive us.

Miracles of American democracy

As every patriotic American knows with every fibre of their being, this great nation has been extravagantly blessed by God since He guided the Mayflower to these shores all those many years ago. After the revolutionary war, which finally gave God an actual foothold on earth, our profound faith in the Almighty gave us "Manifest Destiny," a God-given mission statement that guides America to this very day.

There are those who claim America lost her way in the post WW2 era. There are those who claim civil rights and gay rights and losing Viet Nam made God turn away from America. There are those who claim that the likes of Mike Pompeo, with his lyin' cheatin' stealin' ways, besmirched God's good name.

Nonsense! The miracles of 2020 put the lie to those who doubt American Exceptionalism.

First miracle; The Democratic Party Primaries.  As you may recall, the candidate they call "Sleepy Joe" stumbled badly out of the blocks. He was handily eclipsed in the first few rounds by Bernie and Mayor Pete. Then, the first 2020 miracle, in North Carolina. Sleepy Joe comes out of nowhere. Only the hand of the divine could engineer such a comeback. The pretenders quickly made way for God's anointed. Sleepy Joe miraculously became the official candidate!

Second miracle; the Trump campaign.  Donald Trump was never expected to win in 2016, and he certainly wasn't supposed to win in 2020. Further, the political establishment that had displeased Our Lord for the last seventy years was determined to see to it that such an eventuality would never come to pass.

To that end, they hammered Trump with the most sustained campaign of negative media coverage in the history of electoral politics. This campaign was utterly relentless for four full years. Each concocted slur upped the ante on the last one. By the time the 2020 race got serious, Trump was the most lyin', most misogynist, most xenophobic, most homophobic, and, last but not least, most RACIST candidate in the history of the nation.

After Nov. 3, we learned that the four year campaign of Trump-bashing resulted in an increase in his voter support from Blacks, Hispanics, and gays. In fact, some twelve million more Americans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. All told, Trump polled four million more presidential votes in 2020 than Obama did in his record-smashing 2008 election. Truly a miracle!

Third miracle; the resurrection of Sleepy Joe. So, Trump got more votes in 2020 than any presidential campaign in over 200 years of American democracy... except for one. Yup, Trump may have smashed Obama's record vote total... but Sleepy Joe trumped that miracle by another SEVEN MILLION!!!

Who could even imagine such a miracle! Our Lord chose to speak through the millions of masked, but not silenced, Dem voters who voted early, or voted by mail, or both. 

The silent majority is silent no more! 

And, far more importantly, the result of the election proves that God still cradles America in His loving embrace. 

Now that God has revealed His will, let us come together to forward the Lord's agenda in China, Iran, Russia, Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and any other nations that have lost the path of true democracy.

Miracles can happen among those hapless peoples too.

Just put your faith in the Lord.

Meet Bruno, our Italian mastiff

At least a thousand times I've heard the Farm Manager say we'll never get another "large" dog. That all went out the window when this pretty boy showed up at R&R Rescue and Resort just up the road.

How to change the world without war, mayhem, or revolution

It's all about the tax code.

What we need is a tax regimen that discourages the formation of extravagant wealth. Billionaires have way too much money, and when they invest their excess money in politics, nothing good will ensue for non-billionaires. 

We need a political leader with the cajones to stand on a platform that promises a tax structure that will turn every billionaire into a millionaire.

That would sell to the masses.

And if you're super-rich, it's really no skin off your ass, as you get to keep 999 million, which should keep the Gulfstream in the air and keep the staff on the yacht and the London and New York City homes flush for the duration. 

But we'd seriously curtail the ability of the super-rich to twist politics to their whims. Mike Bloomberg would think twice about tossing $100 millions at an election campaign if he only had a $999 million kitty to draw from.

I love Amazon, and here's why you should too

Ya, I know I've talked a lot of shit talk about Amazon. Because the greedy money-grubbing cunts who run the joint richly deserve the opprobrium, and that's especially true of CIA stooge and greedbag-in-chief Jeff Bezos.

Who knew an online bookstore would take over the world?

But you gotta give credit where credit is due.

Check out this story at CBC: Amazon opens pickup depot in Iqaluit. 

Apparently the anti-Christ and his minions have managed to do what the government of Canada has been unable to do forever, ie get the necessaries of life into the far north.

Read the story. 

Hopefully this won't make you hate Amazon less... you need to hate government more!

The zen of shopping for bath towels

We were sitting in front of the (fake) fire, deeply lost in our screens, when the Farm Manager announced, apropos of nothing, that she was shopping for bath towels on Amazon. (Is a gas fire actually "fake?" It is an actual fire, after all.)

I hate Amazon and I hate everything it stands for. 

Rampant unbridled consumerism. The fact that it's making it's CIA-cozy boss millions per minute just ramps up the hatred.

I already know it's a fucked up world, and I've said so often enough right here on this blog, but when the world's richest man and the CIA figure into a post about buying bath towels, well, you know it's way more fucked up than anybody could have imagined, even a year ago.

So I embark on a scorched earth "anybody but Amazon" campaign. 

As in, "I'm just gonna feel dirty if I dry off with a towel from Amazon." 

That's mostly bullshit. When I'm towelling off, I think about getting dry. I'm not wondering where the towel came from.

But anyway, my rant got the FM considering other potential bath towel provisioners. 

Believe or not, after an hour on the internet, she concluded that our best bet for new bath towels was Canadian Tire.

Wow!

Evolving our Yellow Peril propaganda

There's a reason I keep banging away at this Yellow Peril thing. War with China should be seen as a far greater threat to our well-being than either covid or climate change.

Yet, day after day, our big media, the supposedly "responsible" outfits, are pushing an anti-China agenda. While the discourse is drenched in faux outrage over China's record on human rights, the reality is that the great push for confrontation with China comes primarily from the purveyors of American Exceptionalism in Washington.

These people are determined to maintain American hegemony over the planet at any cost. Think that through.

Generally speaking, reportage around Meng and the Two Michaels in Canadian media has been devoid of serious context. They'll acknowledge that yes, we did in fact nab Meng first, but that was totally rule-of-law hunky-dory because Uncle Sam asked us to nab her, because she violated US sanctions against Iran, and, well... rule of law!

Never have I seen in any Canadian media an explication of the precise nature of those US sanctions on Iran. Are they legal? Who says so, and why? 

Today, Jeremy Nuttall has a update on Meng and the Michaels in the Toronto Star that dispenses with the Iran angle altogether. And why not? It's a pesky detail in the narrative, and American Exceptionalism doesn't do well with pesky details. Here's how Nuttall explains the arrest of Meng Wanzhou:

The United States is seeking her extradition to face bank fraud and other charges related to allegations going back years.

Cute, eh? Iran has completely disappeared from the story!

China bad! We're the innocent victims of Chinese communism! We MUST rely on our our allies to "voice their displeasure with China..."

What allies do you suppose we're talking about? Australia? New Zealand? Are those countries going to change China's policies? Of course not! Whenever you see references to our need to rely on allies, the ally we're talking about is the USA.

So, our national security, our dignity, our sovereignty, are all reliant on the failing and flailing American Empire. Whether it's Donald or Joe or Kamala in the White House doesn't make much difference. Our policy-makers and their media echo chamber are determined to hitch our wagon to US foreign policy. 

Ponder that.

Red Bay Lodge

Me and the Farm Manager took a tour over to the Red Bay Lodge today, to check out the fish and chips.

From what I hear, and this is all hearsay, the joint was boarded up for a few years. It's one of those old-school summer resorts, a short walk from the shores of Lake Huron. Popular with a working class who couldn't afford their own cottage but wanted to take the family on a vacation. They had rooms in the main lodge and then cabins. There's places just like it all around the Great Lakes. Now that our betters have re-jigged the economy in such a way that working people can no longer afford vacations, these old-school lodges have been struggling.

So it was good news when a young couple decided to bring the place back to life, and I guess they were just getting on top of things when the virus struck. After a complete shut-down in the spring they were trying to nurse the business back from the dead, when they got their insurance renewal, which informed them that their annual insurance premium had gone from seventeen to fifty-four thousand dollars.

That seems grotesquely unfair to me. For that young couple struggling to get a business going, they're already up against a covid regimen that favours the big chains. Then their insurance company pulls this? You can bet the chains aren't paying anywhere near that kind of money for equivalent square footage.

You'd almost think there's a plot afoot to drive the last independents out of business. Oddly enough, billionaire Warren Buffet (no. 6 on the Forbes billionaire rankings) owns a gaggle of insurance companies, and his pal Bill Gates (no. 3) is rumoured to be the mastermind behind the lockdowns... 

Which is why we figured it was the right thing to do to drive out to Red Bay. 

As for the fish and chips, highly recommended!

 

Which lives matter most?

They've been having quite a time of it out in Alberta with the "second wave," possibly because they came out of the first wave relatively unscathed, leaving an abundance of low-hanging fruit lingering in the long term care homes. In reading up on the pandemic in Alberta I learned that the average age of a covid death in the province is 82, and will typically have at least three co-morbidities, the most common of which is dementia.

Those are the people we've been killing the economy for in order to "save lives." There isn't a jurisdiction in the world where anything remotely resembling lockdown would have been contemplated based on the mortality rates of those under age 65. Deaths globally are massively skewed towards the elderly. 

Ironically, society otherwise doesn't give a whole lot of thought, let alone support, to the elderly. Long term care institutions are systemically underfunded throughout the capitalist democracies, often to the point of criminal negligence. Until the pandemic, nobody much cared.

That's all changed! We gotta get the deadly virus under control! It's cutting years off the wait lists at the long-term care facilities! OMG!!!

LOCK'r DOWN TIGHT!!! MASK UP YOU SELFISH BASTARD!!!... 

So, which lives suddenly matter most in this time of pestilence? 

Not black lives. Not "all" lives.... the lives that matter most are those oldsters lying neglected in nursing homes, who don't know who or where they are, and are oblivious to the fact that their diaper hasn't been changed for two days.

According to the economics of this pandemic, those are the lives that matter most.

When the best and the brightest aren't up to the job

When it was revealed last week that Canada had offloaded responsibility for vaccine distribution to the Canadian Armed Forces, I was underwhelmed. After all, the Forces long ago morphed from being a "can-do" kind of operation to more of a "we'll do what we can as long as it doesn't a) cost too much, b) hurt anyone's feelings, and c) doesn't endanger the health and/or safety of the fine women, men, and others in uniform."

If that announcement was underwhelming, today's Globe and Mail headline on the vaccine roll-out is downright disturbing; "Ottawa searches for technology to handle vaccine distribution."

Huh? Isn't the roll-out set to start next week? 

If you're wondering why that should be disturbing news, allow me to refresh your memory with a flashback to the Phoenix pay system scandal. That's where Big Steve figured he could save a bit of money by replacing lazy-ass civil servants with technology. The system has been in the works for over a decade, was officially rolled out five years ago, and... still doesn't work!

Big Steve is long gone, of course, but the same Big Tech cartel that couldn't get Phoenix up and running with a five year lead time is now going to provide a nationwide vaccine tracking infrastructure in a matter of weeks?

Good luck with that!

Your daily dose of anti-China propaganda

Take a gander at the front page of the Globe and Mail today; "FIRST LOOK AT CHINESE FORCED- LABOUR CAMP," the all caps headline screams at us!

Great! We've heard so much about these "concentration camps." Finally Nathan Vanderklippe is going to provide us with a actual first look!

Alas, the 4,000 words that follow scarcely live up to the promise of that headline. He took a picture of some buildings behind a fence, where allegedly the commies are building daycares to free up parents to go to work, and other concentration-camp-type outrages. Vanderklippe taps a trio of "Western researchers" to flesh out his utterly news-free scoop. They are:

Professor Laura Murphy, a seasoned anti-China hand whose most recent Yellow Peril screed appeared in the Washington Post mere days ago

Nathan Ruser of the rabidly anti-Chinese Australia Strategic Policy Institute

Adrian Zenze, an anti-communist "human rights activist."

At the Globe and Mail, the concept of balanced journalism is dead and buried. Instead, a regular diet of anti-China propaganda, driven by the US State Department, is pretty much the only point of view we're going to get.

How to fake a pandemic in four easy steps

Disclaimer: This article is strictly hypothetical. I am in no way claiming that the current pandemic has been faked. I am merely suggesting that in the event that party(s) unknown were inclined to do such a thing, these might be some useful strategies.

Step One: Crank up the hype. The hype was being cranked unbelievably back in January. Yup, a deadly killer virus was on the move. Oh my God, it'll be the worst thing ever! Even then we were being regaled with comparisons to the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920. Canada enjoyed three more months of over-the-top hype before suffering a single covid death.

Step Two: Create a definition of a new disease  that is so broad, so diverse, so inclusive, that virtually any symptom under the sun qualifies as a symptom of the new deadly disease. Runny nose? Could be the virus. Sore throat? Could be the virus. Headache? Could be the virus. Muscle cramps? Cough? Sneezing? Aching joints? Could be the virus.

Step Three: Once you have defined the scary new disease, come up with a test to detect its presence. Ideally, you should have a test that will be as generous in the detection as you were in defining the symptoms. If, perchance, your test detects a cold you had last year and calls it covid, well, better to err on the side of bigger numbers. Remember, we're just idly speculating about hypothetical people wanting to panic the populace with a fake virus. 

Step Four: Pump up the jam! Numbers numbers numbers! Cases cases cases! Never confuse the public by publishing test numbers anywhere they're easy to find. Otherwise folks might get wise to the fact that whenever there's a new RECORD COVID CASES headline, there was also a record number of tests done that day that never made it into the news.

That should pretty much get your "pandemic" off the ground! How long you can keep it aloft is up to you. If you're part of that exceptionally privileged cohort who happen to own the world's information infrastructure, you can probably milk it for a good long while.

What you do with that opportunity is up to you.

A brief respite from Yellow Peril hysteria

Charles Burton, a frequent anti-China ranter in the pages of the Globe and Mail, was at it again yesterday. Four paragraphs in, the reader is treated to this bit of speculation, "...the unlikely coughing canary in the coal mine of potentially cataclysmic global strife lies in China's recent diplomatic blitz against our plucky Commonwealth cousins in Australia."

There follows a list of "achievements" our plucky cousins have scored in their campaign to alienate their most important trading partner, a self-defeating policy if ever there was one. Charles recommends we show our own pluck by standing in solidarity with our cousins by buying Australian wine over the holiday season.

Burton is advertised as a Senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an outfit financially supported by a bevy of A-list Big Pharma and Big Oil multinationals,  a variety of foundations, and the governments of Latvia, Japan, Taiwan, and the US. Its influence in Canadian media is deep and broad. There's rarely a day goes by when one or more MLI "fellows," "advisors," or "experts" don't have their China-bashing or Russia-bashing articles published in the Globe and Mail or on the CBC, or both.

Here's a timely rebuttal to Burton's warmongering by Tony Kevin, a former Australian diplomat, and one of the few Aussies with the pluck to speak out against the prevailing US driven anti-China hysteria: Australia sabotaged its own interests in China relations.

Since we're flirting with "potentially cataclysmic global strife," maybe we should call a time-out on the trash talk and take a moment to consider a point of view you'll not find at the CBC and the Globe and Mail. Maybe it will help us avoid the cataclysm. 

The greatest "democracy" diddle of all time

 As regular readers (hi Dad!) will know, I'm not convinced that it makes any significant difference whether Trump or Biden is in the White House after next January.

But this joke of an election that the world's premier democracy just put on would seem to validate the claims of every anti-American ranter who ever ranted.

The guy who couldn't get three dozen people to a town hall blew away all presidential voting records?

Get the fuck outta here!

This is the model of governance that America imposes on the world at the point of a gun.

This won't end well.

Fun with firearms

Let me tell you right off the top that I'm a firm believer in gun control. Between the ex-wives and the near misses, (and none of the partings would be considered "cordial" by an honest judge) if it was as easy to buy a gun here as it is in Ohio or Michigan, I'd be a gonner for sure. Heck, I wouldn't have seen middle age!

I happened across the doc on Hunter Thompson the other day, Buy the ticket; take the ride, or something along those lines. Thompson is largely responsible for the demise of both responsible journalism and proper English, in my estimation, but I was a big fan of his writing back in the 70's, as were ten million other pot-addled wankers writing for their college newspapers.

Thompson was allegedly a chap who knew how to have fun with firearms.

So the Farm Manager is watching this old Law and Order episode where the good guys are trying to pin a conviction on a gun dealer for selling a gun to a wacko who used it to kill people, and I'm watching a wacko who only killed himself with his gun, and naturally, we get to talking about guns and gun control.

In these parts it's probably safe to assume that nine out of ten homes along your concession road have guns residing therein. Me and the FM are among the "free riders" in this scenario. When the urban hordes head up this way in the coming "reset," after the grid goes down and all the supermarkets have been looted, it'll be the gun-toting neighbours who turn them back at the county line, not us.

My hunch is they'll be turned back a few county lines before they make it up here, but that's just speculation.

Generally speaking, the guns residing locally are legally owned and registered. Generally speaking, the guns that make headlines are not. After that whack job in Nova Scotia shot down 22 people last summer, PM Fluffy banned 1,500 models of "assault" rifles within a week, long before it came out that all the weapons deployed by the nutter came through illegal channels. 

(And that in itself is a factoid that is seriously fucked up... What? There's 1500 different kinds of assault rifles???????)

How do you stop nutters who use illegal guns by sandbagging legal and law-abiding gun owners?

Meanwhile, that media franchise most invested in gun crime, the Toronto Star, wins a fucking award for a how-to guide on smuggling guns from Ohio and Michigan into Canada.

It's a fucked up world.

Top brass couldn't drive Taliban out of Kandahar or racists out of their ranks. Should we trust them with the vaccine roll-out?

Canadians were aghast at the revelations unearthed by the Somalia Commission more than 25 years ago. The inquiry exposed a culture of rampant racism in the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces and led to calls for reform. Fast forward a quarter century, and guess what? Last week the Toronto Star treated us to this headline; Canadian Armed Forces moves to crack down on racism and extremism in its ranks.

That racism nut is apparently a tough one for the Forces to crack... but that fact doesn't seem to temper the wave of adulation greeting the news that we've got a Major-General supervising our national pandemic vaccine roll-out. According to CTV, the military already has dozens of officers embedded with the Canada Public Health Agency. 

Same deal here in Ontario, where Premier Doug has tapped retired General Rick Hillier to oversee vaccine distribution. Hillier was the guy who stupidly promised to run the Taliban "murderers and scumbags" out of Afghanistan in short order. That was in 2005. By 2008 Hillier had retired from the Forces to pursue opportunities in the private sector, and today the murderers and scumbags are negotiating with the US government about their (the US, not the murderers and scumbags) final surrender, or, if you will, "victory." Hillier will trouser a cool $20 thou/month for his vaccine efforts.

Our future is in the most trusted hands our politicians can find. I for one am not impressed.

Why gold will triumph over crypto in the long run

 

There's certainly been plenty of easy money made on speculating in Bitcoin and the like. And plenty of money lost, too.

Yet as Bitcoin had its recent run towards 20k, there were numerous pontificators speculating that cryptos were displacing gold as a "storehouse of value."

Not a chance.

When the shit hits the fan, and as long we have a clique in Washington convulsed with the delusion that America must rule the world, it inevitably will, the world wide web will be history about fifteen minutes into the first day.

What's your Bitcoin worth then?

Gold, on the other hand, will keep doing what it's done for thousands of years; serve as a storehouse of value. When electrical grids are down and the internet is gone, gold will rule again.

An insult to every Canadian

Or at least every Canadian who still imagines this to be in some sense an independent sovereign state.

Check this out from CBC; US Justice Department in talks with Meng Wanzhou. 

You know the story. World Cop USA is hot to show Iran and China who's the boss. They make up some totally illegal bullshit sanctions, and then charge Meng Wanzhou, CFO of one of China's iconic brands, for violating those bullshit sanctions.

Getting their hands on Meng would be a real score. What a great way to humiliate China! And humiliate China we must.

They are communists.

They hate freedom and democracy.

They are determined to take over the world.

Therefore, we must hate them. We must rally with our allies to stymie them at every turn.

Meng was savvy enough to avoid US airspace, but when Uncle Sam tapped PM Fluffy with the job of nabbing her, Trudeau was delighted to oblige.

And here we are, two years later, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the US government is negotiating not with the government of Canada, but with Meng directly!

Because it matters not a whit what the government of Canada has to say on the matter. The government of Canada will be happy to go along with whatever decisions are made in Washington.

Winter strikes again!

Every year, winter catches me by surprise.

As a guy who survived long enough to get a pension, you'd think I'd have spotted the pattern by now, but no. Winter is a complete shock every year.

Although winter does not officially commence for a few weeks yet, the winter weather has moved in. The school kids got a day off yesterday, and the snowplow drivers are getting decent hours. 

December one isn't a bad time for winter to start. I would say January one isn't a bad time for it to end.  So things are looking good!

Not really. 

Every news outlet I turn to is still hyperventilating about Trump's reluctance to officially throw in the towel. The purpose of the hysterical hyperventilation is to make you think it matters whether it's Biden or Trump in the White House for the next four years.

It makes no difference whatsoever. If anything, we increase the odds of serious conflict with Russia and China with a President Biden, because he is very much favoured by the warmongering classes whose money elects presidents.

But either way, rest assured the rich will prosper, and the rest of us are fucked.

Street racing then and now

I've occasionally taken a run down memory lane to revisit the glory days of street racing. Oh, those were glorious days alright! We thought we were the coolest cats in town, melting the polyglas tires off our 340 Dusters (275 hp) and 396 Novas (375 hp).

Over the years my cohort has shed a lot of tears bemoaning the fact that the "younger generations" don't have the interest to keep the sport of driving fast cars fast alive...

What were we thinking?

In the old days, something that made an honest 500 hp was considered a scary ride. Nowadays half a dozen manufacturers will happily sell you over 700 hp off the showroom floor. The youngsters tuning the twin-turbo Vipers and 1000 hp Mustangs today would consider the twelve second rocketships of my era embarrassingly slow.

The "tuning" is different too. It used to involve screwdrivers and feeler gauges. Now it seems to involve plugging in a laptop. Sounds simple enough, but I haven't a clue what they're actually doing with the computer technology. My computer know-how is pretty much maxed out when I watch these videos, never mind tuning a 1600 hp engine from my laptop.

And the speeds they're hitting these days are incomprehensible by 1970 standards. These guys are dipping into the sevens at speeds approaching 200 mph. Those would have been funny-car times back in the day. Now they're doing that with cars that have power steering and air-conditioning!

So, apologies to the younger generations - you've obviously kept the flame alive!

But here's what I find sad. Back in the day, any goober with a job could get into the game. I don't think that's the case anymore. Driving fast cars fast has become a rich kid's pastime.

Pity!

Meet Mickey Two-Traps

Into a world short of heroes, a new legend is born; Mickey Two-Traps.

Mickey's adventures in the pantry have gone viral in Mouseworld. Many have ventured into the pantry. Few have lived to tell the tale.

And what a tale Mickey has to tell! 

"The morons who own the joint have gone in for those laughable Victor "quick-set" traps. Right away the odds of surviving go from zero to fifty-fifty. That maybe led me to let my guard down a little, but I wasn't ready for what happened next. Thinking I'd caught a whiff of peanut butter, I went into the corner to investigate, and... WHAM!

When I came to, I tried to shake the damn trap loose, but I couldn't see anything, and next thing I know, I back right into another trap! 

SNAP! 

Now I got one trap on my head and another one stuck on my ass and I'm starting to think I might not make it home... 

And then, a miracle! The dorkshit who set the traps gives me a lift out to the compost heap and let's me go free!"

Yup, it's all true. They're raising pints in Mickey's honour all over Mouseworld. He has become a living legend. 

Enjoy the glory while you can, Mr. Two-Traps. I've set up an old-school Victor "original" in the pantry, just for you.

Come back any time you like.

Greasing the skids for war on China

The Yellow Peril demonization pogrom continues apace in Canadian national media. At the Globe and Mail it fell to Campbell Clark to carry the can today; "Canada must embrace Biden's China alliance."

There's an obvious typo in the title; it's an anti-China alliance Biden is crafting, and he's hot to trot. In fact, in his first call with Justin after the election, and apparently Campbell was on the line, Biden was "effusive about working with allies."

How effusive was he? Not effusive enough. Mr. Clark suggests we "should be pushing" Biden in the right direction lest he waver in his resolve to confront the Yellow Peril, "we" being the allies who have shivered through four years of darkness waiting for the light of freedom to shine again in Biden's City on a Hill.

Meanwhile, over at the CBC, Evan Dyer wants us to follow Australia's lead and ramp up the Yellow Peril rhetoric. Perhaps if we join Australia in pushing back against Chinese aggression it'll stiffen Biden's spine? That's a somewhat unlikely scenario. Canada and Australia together spend about 7% of what the US spends on "security" every year. Fortunately, the prospects of pipsqueak me-too nations like Canada and Australia bringing China to heel are purely imaginary.

After four years in the shadow of the Orange Ogre, The Nations of Virtue are uniting again behind the leadership of the Exceptional and Indispensable Nation, the nation with the most powerful military machine in history.

Be afraid.

Best of times for Amazon and Walmart; worst of times for independent retail

As Toronto re-enters lockdown on account of the "second wave," there's umbrage in the air over the fact that Walmart and some other big chains will remain open, while independent retailers are forced to close.

Independent retail has been up against it for a long time, long before the pandemic. In a nutshell, the reason is this; people would rather save a few cents shopping at Amazon or Walmart, than to pay a little more and keep their local independents in business. 

The pandemic is the final nail in the coffin for a wide swath of independent businesses. We'll be happy enough to blame the virus for their demise, when the truth is that everyone who's ever shopped Walmart, Costco, or Amazon deserves a share of the blame. 

When we are conditioned to measure our lives by how much crap we consume, a retail model that optimizes crap-per-dollar will inevitably prevail.

Shame on all of us.

The worst of times; the best of times

Have you noticed that all the folks telling you you gotta stay home have cushy jobs where they can work from home?

While this plague is the worst of times, it's the best of times for folks who know how to make hay under the pandemic sun. Check out this headline; How billionaires got $637 billion richer during pandemic.

And it's not just billionaires. 

This pandemic summer has been the busiest in memory for building contractors around here. Real estate is booming. Folks who can afford it aren't shy about building new homes.

And don't cry too many tears for the front-line workers. Any nurse who's been working double shifts for the last six months is having paydays like never before in their careers. They're buying those new builds.

There's a Harley dealership in Pennsylvania having its best year ever. Seems every other yokel in the county signed over their covid check as a down payment back in the spring. Most of those purchasers were operating on the "we're fucked anyway" premise. The world is going for a shit anyway, so I might as well get a couple of months tooling around on the Harley of my dreams.

By the fall, most of these customers had defaulted on their loans, and now the dealer gets paid by the lenders to repo all those bikes. 

Business has never been better!

Enjoy those winter driving blues, Parker

 My nephew Parker is about to set out on his first cross-country solo drive. Good on ya, kid! I repost this "Winter Blues" missive from a few years ago in your honour!

Winter Blues

Back when I toiled in the Budd plant in Kitchener there was a shorthand used to refer to your co-workers.

We worked among Rastamen and Polskies and Ukes and Newfs and Frenchies and Krauts.

Every Portugese guy was known as Goose or Magellan or Vasco de Gamma.

One night after second shift let out we headed for the all-night liquor store in Stratford. A couple of home boys and a couple of Rastas in Frenchy's Javelin, with Frenchy driving.

I don't know to this day whether there actually was an all-night liquor store in Stratford, but we almost died trying to find out.

I do recall there was a 24 hour beer store in Toronto. We did make it there one night.

But Frenchy's Javelin ended up in the ditch on its roof that winter night, with five thirsty guys just getting thirstier.

Winter blues.

There's something about winter that makes desperation more desperate.

Me and Kipling headed out west to make our fortune in the dead of one winter. Went in the ditch 50 miles east of Winnipeg. Went in the ditch at a high rate of speed while I was both napping and driving simultaneously. 

Winter blues.

If you're watching this at home, kids, don't drive and nap simultaneously.

It's not a happy thing.

There was a Neil Young song popular at the time that glorified going to Alberta. I think most of us were just going to Alberta because Neil Young had sung a song about it...

Years later me and Terry ran out to Calgary in the dead of winter. Lost a wheel bearing somewhere around Bumfuck Manitoba in the middle of the night when it was -40 degrees outside.

You can't fix a wheel bearing without going outside.

-40 is really fucking cold!

Winter blues.

Winter adventures.

The Kid still swears that the best day of his life, and he's had an awful pile of great ones, was the day I picked him up at the hospital in Vegreville, in the dead of winter, and we toured all the way into the foothills and beyond, all the way to Mount Robson, him with his bottle of pills and me with my case of beer, and we ended up in Edmonton totally fucked up and just in time for a Triumph concert.

In the dead of winter.

Winter blues.

********

Happy trails, Parker!

China threatens to "poke out eyes" of Uncle Sam's chorus girls

Well, here's some nasty trash talk from the Yellow Peril!

Seems the commies have their knickers in a twist over this joint statement released yesterday by the foreign ministers of the US and their toadies in the "Five Eyes" club. That's a mighty impressive finger wag on freedom of speech, coming from a cartel of America's most obsequious ass-kissers. The Five Eyes are devoted to free speech so long as it's aimed at the enemies of Empire. If, perchance, free speech is wielded by the likes of Julian Assange, these stalwarts of free speech and rule of law don't hesitate to run roughshod over the law to stifle freedom of speech.

You'd think the junior members of the Five Eyes club would take a moment to survey the battleground they are preparing. They are hitching their little me-too wagons to the exceptional, indispensable nation, the nation that hasn't won a war since 1945 in spite of having started so many (ok,ok... they whupped Grenada fair and square).

What could go wrong?

Will Biden claw back Trump's lavish gifts to Israel?

It's hard to make a case for Trump having made America "great" again over these past four years, but there is no question he has made Israel greater than ever (not to be confused with more secure than ever).

From moving the embassy, to ceding the Golan to Israel, to greenlighting unlimited settlement on the occupied territories, to the "Deal of the Century," to ditching the Iran deal, to dispatching Soleimani, to the Abraham Accords, the last four years have been truly golden for Israel's extremist ruling coalition.

And the happy days aren't over yet. Just yesterday, America's Jesus-loving Secretary of State promised Netanyahu that the US would henceforth get tough on the legions of American Jew-haters who try to disguise their antisemitism as "legitimate" criticism of Israel's seventy-plus years of genocidal anti-Palestinian policies. Furthermore, rumours abound that Trump is toying with a parting gift for his fan club in the Knesset; a direct military attack on Iran.

Does any serious person imagine that Biden finds Trump's pro-Israel moves objectionable?

No. Unquestioning Israel boosterism is Washington's most successful example of bipartisanship.

Unfortunately, while this blind allegiance to the Likudniks has been good for the ruling clique in the Holy Land, it's not, in the long run, good for Israel or for peace in the region. Many times we have heard top IDF boffins speculate aloud about how many hundreds of thousands of missiles Hezbollah has squirrelled away in the hills of southern Lebanon. A direct attack on Iran would in short order provide some clarity on this question... but by then it will be too late to matter.

In the long term, the most serious existential threat to Israel comes from their Christian Zionist cheerleaders in Washington.

The last four years were about Russiagate - will the next four be about Hunter's laptop?

The swells who own the global information infrastructure have done a great job making Hunter's laptop disappear from the news cycle - for three weeks. It would be folly to assume it will stay buried. Once the euphoria of Papa Joe's victory wears off, as it inevitably must, Hunter's laptop and the secrets thereof will be discovered anew. 

In the meantime, it's intriguing to see that every story in the Globe and Mail or on CBC about Trump's challenge to the election results contains multiple warnings that his allegations lack any shred of evidence. I don't recall any such warnings when they were regaling us with Russiagate yarns for four years running.

There's a disturbing trend afoot to "other" the 73 million Americans who voted for Trump. That's ten million more than voted for Trump four years ago. Not only that, but the greatest racist of all time also increased his share of Black and Hispanic votes, presumably because black and brown voters truly aren't smart enough to know a racist demagogue when they see one.

The narrative being spun is that since Trump is a lying racist moron, only racist morons would support him. The first guest on CBC's "The Current" on Nov 4 informed me that the election was a referendum on white supremacy. If that's the case, might as well toss the fake healing and reconciliation out the window now...

Send the racist white trash back to Europe where it came from!

Latest numbers reveal lethality of COVID-19 down exponentially from first wave

When we compare covid case counts between the first and second waves of the pandemic, the (first wave) seven day moving average peaked at 1754 during the first week of May. Today it's at 4554.

While daily case numbers are up over 250%, daily deaths have dropped from a first wave seven day moving average peak of 176, to 58 today, a drop of 67% in absolute numbers.

Put another way, the case fatality rate has plunged from .1 during the first wave, to .01 today. That would seem to undermine the scary headlines about alarm bells and runaway trains we're treated to every day by those whose mission it is to frighten the populace.

_________________

For readers who want to double-check my math, (which is a good idea), I get the stats here and here.

If Trump had half a brain

 If Trump had half a brain he'd get the hell out of that White House and give Joe a "all the best" pat on the back on the way out.

Let Joe take the fall for the next million covid deaths.

Let Joe deal with the fallout when Israel attacks Iran.

Let Joe rise to the occasion as various vassal states in Africa and the Middle East and the Balkans break into open conflict with one another. Let Joe explain why America typically sells arms to all sides. (But don't worry, the F-35 we sell Israel is not the F-35 we sell the Arabs...)

If Trump had half a brain, he'd bow out gracefully now, and bide his time. 

2024 is closer than you think. 

Rising water level wipes out walking trail on Georgian Bay

 Check this out. The broken pavement in foreground is the trail where I used to walk the hounds every morning. The bench is half buried in beach detritus. If this continues the Best Western will become a boat-in destination!

I thought I smelled chipmunk farts...

I'm sitting in the lounge area at Baywest Toyota, because every few months the car tells me it needs maintenance. 

The assistant service manager comes out carrying the air filter that allegedly cleanses the cabin air in my car. He's holding it out in front like he made some kind of exotic discovery.

"I think maybe you got squirrels or something building a nest here."

It's the damned chipmunks. Even though Doublewide dispatched half a dozen of the little bastards over the summer, there's plenty left. I often see them duck under the car, and they'll sit on top of the tires keeping an eye on the cat, me, and the bird-feeders. 

When the coast is clear they'll make a dash for the peanuts we put out for the woodpeckers and blue-jays. 

After a hearty lunch, I suppose they retire to my air cleaner for a leisurely nap.

Here's what I'm wondering. If AI is so smart, instead of the car telling me it "needs maintenance," why can't it tell me there's chipmunks living in it?

Even better would be if that artificial intelligence could get them to move somewhere else.

World welcomes USA to 20th century!

Kamala Harris is but a heart-beat away from the Oval Office! Let the gushing and swooning begin!

Women are finally reaching the ultimate glass ceiling in the dispirited states of America. Just heard an over-the-top CBC commentator gushing and swooning at the same time, which can be problematic for one's undergarments, but not unexpected; the CBC doesn't really think anything happens in the world unless it involves the US.

Just to put Kamala's achievement into perspective, here's a list of countries where women have already been head of state or head of government. Many of these countries have done so more than once, and most of them were doing it last century.

Argentina

Australia

Austria

Bangladesh

Barbados

Belgium

Bolivia

Brazil

Bulgaria

Burundi

Central African Republic

Canada

Chile

Croatia

China

Costa Rica

Denmark

Dominica

East Germany (DDR)

Ethiopia

Estonia

France

Finland

Germany

Gabon

Greece

Guyana

Guinea Bissau

Haiti

Indonesia

Ireland

Israel

India

Iceland

Jamaica

Kosovo

Lithuania

Liberia

Latvia

Malta

Mali

Malawi

Mozambique

Mongolia

Myanmar

Namibia

Norway

Nicaragua

Pakistan

Panama

Peru

Philippines

Portugal

Poland

Rwanda

Romania

Senegal

Singapore

Slovakia

South Korea

Sri Lanka

Taiwan

Thailand

Trinidad and Tobago

Turkey

Ukraine

UK

Yugoslavia

I may have missed a few, but you get the point. Most of the world got to this milestone half a century ago. It's nice to see the Exceptional Nation catching up!

Maybe in another fifty years they'll take a crack at public health care!

 

Blow off your worries with a walk in the woods

We're getting a touch of Indian Summer in November in these parts. Doesn't happen every year.

Between Trump, Biden, covid, and a collapsed economy, most everyone has plenty to worry about. So it was that I decided to get away from it all with a hike in the woods yesterday.

They've re-jigged the Bruce Trail a bit lately, and one of their official side-trails now cuts through the farm next door. I picked up the trail there and headed up towards what is variously known around here as Kemble Mountain, Kemble Rock, or, among the jaded, the Kemble Bump.

Four hours hiking through fresh air and warm temperatures and composting leaves. I had a drink from a stream cascading from higher up. At one point, a sign; "Caution: bear in Area." We're a few days into deer season but not a hunter seen or heard. Just leaves (leafs?) rustling in a middling breeze, bird-song, the scolding of squirrels. I ventured off the Bruce Trail in favour of over-grown logging roads and ATV trails, and for a few kilometres went off-piste altogether. 

Rotting stumps of oaks felled 150 years ago when the first settlers cleared the land. Old stone fence-lines that once marked cleared fields long overgrown again. Every stone of tens and hundreds of thousands in these fence-lines placed there by human hands. Much of this geography was only briefly conquered. Nature is taking the pastures back. Forests felled long ago are growing in again.

Four hours later, all the shit is still shit, and it's still there... but you've gained a whole new perspective on it.

Give it a try.

Trump loses; decorum and decency prevail

There's a reason decency and decorum are held in such high regard by America's permanent ruling class. When you're the world's leading purveyor of murder and mayhem, it's important to have a well-spoken suit as your public face on the world stage. Obama was brilliant in that regard, as were Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. 

Then there's Trump, spewing venom at allies and adversaries alike, in a most indecent and indecorous assault on the norms of diplomatic conduct. His fans considered that "telling it like it is." 

Alas, "telling it like it is" isn't something approved of by the ruling class. After many decades of strutting about the globe, assassinating an unapproved leader here and toppling an hostile regime there, always in the name of human rights and freedom, along comes loose-lips Trump talking about "securing the oil."

No, Donald! It's NOT about the oil, not ever!

It's about freedom! It's about human rights!

If you take a look at the most severe humanitarian crises in the world today, from Afghanistan to Somalia to Syria to Yemen, you'll inevitably find that America's championing of "freedom and human rights" has been an integral factor in driving these catastrophes. When your campaign to spread freedom and human rights requires you to starve children in Iran and Syria and Venezuela, well, to paraphrase Madeliene Albright, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

America's ruling class, after four cringe-worthy years, can breathe easy at last. President Harris will bring back decorum and decency.

It's not likely that the starving children of Syria or Iran or Venezuela will notice or care.

A troubling question for our masters

For the past four years a near unanimous chorus of media voices across broadcast, print, and digital platforms have relentlessly pushed an anti-Trump agenda. From the Access Hollywood gotcha tape, to two years plus of "walls closing in" and "the noose tightening" during the Mueller investigation, to the New York Times making fag-bashing fashionable again, to the plainly absurd Ukie-gate impeachment charade, to the orchestrated attempt by the social media giants to disappear the Hunter Biden laptop story, it's been wall-to-wall anti-Trump hysteria since Trump won the GOP nomination in July 2016.

The question is this; how is it possible, that after a four year saturation influencing operation by the biggest names in news media and the most powerful social media platforms, Donald Trump gets ten million MORE votes in 2020 than he got in 2016?

The gold medal for unhinged hyperbole goes to...

 I've been reading a wide variety of exhortations aimed at getting folks off the couch and out to a voting booth, although with mail-in I suppose you can pretty much stay put. Point is, this is the most important election of your lifetime. Or my lifetime... somebody's lifetime.

Or possibly since the WWII, which possibly could be even longer than a lifetime.

In fact, there are claims that this could be the most consequential election since 1864, or maybe even in the entire history of the USA!

Why is it so important?

For about half the population, it's the last chance to prevent Biden and Harris from turning these United States into the United Soviets of America.

For the other half, it's the last chance to prevent Trump and Pence from turning America into a fascist dictatorship.

So you can see why it's absolutely essential to get out there and exercise your democratic franchise, because one way or the other, this is likely to be the last election in US history! That's in addition to being the most important, and from what I've seen of turnout numbers, there's a lot of folks who don't want to miss this twofer. 

Which is good, because not only is it the most important election in history, it's (and here's the gold medal line) about the next 4000 years!

The gold goes to Bill McKibben at The Guardian.

Lady Gaga ridin' with Biden

To which the only worthwhile response is, get the fuck outta here!

This reminds me of the frantic final 48 hours on Hillary's campaign, when suddenly a bunch of A-list pop culture icons popped up for a desperate hail Mary PR extravaganza.

LeBron. Katy Perry. Madonna...

It didn't work then. It ain't gonna work now.

I've got loads of respect for Lady Gaga. She's done a hell of a lot for her "Little Monster" fan base, ie insecure teens trying to figure out their shit. She's not doing her fan base any favours with this Biden endorsement. 

Lady Gaga has lots of cred in lots of out-there communities, and for her to waste her political capital in an endorsement for a sclerotic establishment douche-bag is a disappointment for many.

Do better, kid.

Second wave falling flat - covid deaths down 82%

 Given all the hype around the much-feared "second-wave," let's take a look at the numbers.

Canada's first wave case numbers peaked on May 3, when the seven day average of new cases hit 1797. The seven day average for daily covid deaths peaked at 175 just four days later, on May 7.

What has changed since the spring? 

Daily covid tests have gone up about five-fold, from approximately ten-twelve thousand per day to 40-60 thousand per day.

The daily new cases have gone up by more than 50%. So far the seven day average in the second wave has peaked on October 28 at 2805 cases.

With testing up 500% and cases up 50%, what has the daily death count done? To this point, the seven day average of daily deaths in this dreaded second wave has peaked at 31, three days ago. That's a drop of over 82% from the peak of the first wave.

But let's lock-r-down anyway, just to be safe...

The steady drip of anti-China warmongering

The Globe and Mail treats us to two Yellow Peril screeds today. On page A3 Robert Fife and Steven Chase display a little faux outrage over the fact that China claims the US and its allies were the aggressors in the Korean war. The reason I suggest their outrage is somewhat inauthentic is because these guys are smart enough to know better. Without the intervention of the US and her allies there would have been no Korean war. China and her people have every right to feel pride in the fact that they helped stymie Uncle Sam's plans for the Korean peninsula. 

Then, on the opinion page, we get a China expert from McGill waxing wise about how important it is to stand with our allies, and poke Xi Jinping in the eye at every opportunity, because that's what the US and her satellites are doing.

Our expert, one Jerome Beaugrand-Champagne, gets right down to the nitty-gritty. PM Fluffy is way too timid around the commies for his liking. He'd like to see us ramp the belligerence to a level that'll get us a pat on the back from Pompeo. Let's recognize Taiwan and send soldiers to defend it!

Sure thing, Jerome - here's your rifle!

What kind of idiocy is this? 

Strangled by Google's algorithms

 Early on in the life of this blog it enjoyed a lovely covid-like growth curve. Since then, unfortunately, Google's algorithms have done a great job "flattening the curve," so to speak.

I suspect I sealed my fate with this post about Seven World Trade Center. Suggesting there was more to 9/11 than the official narrative revealed is heresy, of course. Nine years later I think that post stands the test of time. Why not waterboard Silverstein and Giuliani? It's a harmless enough "interrogation technique" when applied to brown terror suspects. Why should white terror suspects be treated any differently?

There's actually another angle to the Frankel Steel story. Several times during my tenure as an inspector there, I flagged structural columns that had already been approved for shipment but had been fabbed out of the wrong grade of steel, making them substantially weaker than what the design specs called for. It's not unreasonable to assume that some such columns found their way into the building. Could that have contributed to its collapse?

But I digress; back to the algos. Not long after I started the blog, somebody from Before It's News requested permission to post my blog on their site, and it remains there to this day. It's basically a click-bait site and I'm relegated to the "alternative" section, the fringe of the fringe, where you'd think no one would ever find it.

Here's the thing; I routinely get at least two to four times, and frequently more than ten times as many views on any given story on that fringe website than I do at Google-owned Blogger, the biggest blog hosting site on the internet.

How is such a thing even possible?

No more drunken mouse-flinging

We've been enjoying a major mouse infestation here at Falling Downs. I'm more than a little disappointed in Doublewide, the resident mouser. There's other cats were you came from, Catso Fatso. Think about it.

Maybe a week ago I picked up some traps at Home Hardware, or maybe it was TSC. Anyway, we're up to about a dozen of the rodents by now, and I've mastered the art of the one-handed trap-flick that will deliver that dead mouse all the way to the compost pile on the other side of the driveways. I'm not sure dead mice are kosher for compost, but I figure the raccoons will sort that out.

Sunday, for one reason or another, I got a little past my daily quota of Busch Light tallboys. In addition, I had spent several hours pruning pot buds earlier in the day. Your fingers get caked with a layer of resin, which leaves a nice glow. 

Checked the traps before turning in. Yup, another little invader to be pitched. I've done this a dozen times now. I've got it down. I fling the dead rodent while simultaneously opening the trap...

And find myself flat on my back, ten feet from the porch. Worse yet, the trap was still in my hand, and the mouse was still in the trap. I had somehow flung myself, instead of flinging the rodent. As I was lying there, wondering if anything was broken, and enjoying my view of the night sky, the Farm Manager stepped out to enquire whether I needed assistance.

Well, you know how that goes. Once you say yes to the assistance, you've given up the moral high ground.

So I declined the offer, and salvaged my integrity, if not my pride, by getting back on the porch under my own power. 

No more drunken mouse-flinging.

Forget Biden-Trump; watch Macron-Erdogan instead

I've been predicting the imminent demise of the wily Erdogan for about nine years now. I'll be right eventually.

I thought he was a goner in 2016, but apparently Putin saved his ass that time around. He's less likely to be as brotherly next time, what with Erdogan mucking up his various efforts in Syria, Libya, and now Nagorno- Karabakh.

Meanwhile, Sultan-in-waiting Fethullah Gulen hopes his handlers at Foggy Bottom give him another chance. While Turkey is indeed a NATO member, it's likely that those handlers are well aware that it would be a far more reliable (read pliable) ally under a President Gulen.

Enter NATO member Macron, a man with enough arrogance, chutzpah, and self-regard to give Erdogan a run for his money. Macron has troubles aplenty himself; Yellow Vests, Black Death, and a six-million strong Islamist underclass seething with resentments.

 One of the most cherished values of the NATO nations is freedom of speech. In France this freedom is held in especially high regard when it comes to freedom to mock the religion of that aforementioned seething underclass. This has bubbled into the open once again due largely to the folks at Charlie Hebdo reprinting their infamous cartoons of The Prophet to mark the trial of the crazed fanatics who shot up their offices when they were originally published.

This has given Erdogan the opening to pose as the guardian of Islam world-wide. For better or worse, his message is sure to gain traction in the banlieues. How far will white France go to defend its right to mock the religion of its non-white underclass?

There you have it. In this corner, NATO member France. In that corner, NATO member Turkey...

Something's got to give eventually!

Idiots to the left of me, idiots to the right...

Watching the idiocy unfold next door is a downright sobering experience. I had no idea so many people are so stupid.

From the putative left of the spectrum, there's absolutely relentless braying and howling over how Trump is ushering in a Christian-fascist-white-supremacist dictatorship.

From the other side, they're shitting their pants at the prospect of Biden, that's Joe Biden, senator from Mastercard, ushering in a socialist-communist dystopia.

Really? 

What I'm seeing is a lot of business-as-usual. The only thing that's changed is the technology. Thanks to social media, it's become way too easy to weaponize millions of morons.

There's no danger of Biden leading America to socialism, and the country will remain the fascist but secular oligarchy it's always been, regardless of who wins.

Globe and Mail advises parents to install trampolines on condo balconies for their children

There's a lot of hysterical nonsense in today's Globe and Mail, most of which concerns the US election, "the most consequential since 1864," according to contributor and New Yorker stalwart Adam Gopnik. 

What's so consequential about it? 

Whether Trump or Biden prevails on Nov. 3, the American people can be assured of remaining the only modern society without public heath-care. They can be assured of the continued emaciation of the middle and working classes. Income inequality will continue to rage out of control. Military spending will continue to rise, employment precarity will increase, and the homeless crisis will get worse.

In short, the world will continue to be a bed of roses for the billionaires and their minions, while the rest of us double down on the fight for the hind teat.

So why do Gopnik and the other never-Trumpers featured in the Globe's opinion section find this election so important? Because it's the last best chance to turn back the clock to the pre-Trump golden age of the American Empire, when the USA unambiguously led the Nations of Virtue in the battle for freedom and human rights against the forces of darkness; China, Iran, Russia, and the handful of failed states who bob in their wake.

In other words, they're pining for the good old days; Hiroshima, Korea, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria... the glory days when American might determined what was right.

Yessiree, it would be tough to top the foolishness in the opinion pages, but Mathew Hague pulls it off on page p3. The sub-head of his story, on coping with kids in your condo apartment in the time of covid, caught my eye; "climbing walls in bedrooms, foldaway desks with chalkboard, and trampolines on balconies... how some are making the most of their condos for their kids."

I'm not always a big fan of "expert opinion," but I'm willing to bet that 100% of pediatricians would not recommend putting a trampoline on your high-rise balcony for your children.

In this case, I'm with the experts.

What did you think of the debate?

I thought the script-writers did a bang-up job. That would be the crew from Dana White's empire who moved into the White House when Trump did.

The script-writers obviously provided a few more stage notes this time around. I can imagine the margin notes, underlined and highlighted; GET TRUMP TO SHUT UP.

And it worked. There was way less Trump than the last debate, but that just made him look better.

What's amazing, to my way of thinking, is that our information infrastructure has largely convinced us that this entirely stage-managed shit-show of an election somehow matters.

Are Rudy and Hunter banging the same (east european) tarts?

There's gotta be something about those East European women...

Neither Hunter Biden nor Rudy Giuliani can control themselves when exposed to east european women.

And look what happened to Trump!

Ukraine seems to be where most of those women come from, although FLOTUS actually hails from Borat's home country, if I'm not mistaken.

I think we've just uncovered a new conspiracy, folks; PUTIN'S BALTIC BITCHES PLOT TO RULE WORLD.

They already have the White House, so the rest is easy sledding, as they say.

CBC News website helps US State Department spread disinformation

If you're the sort of person who instinctively believes everything that comes out of the US State Department, NATO, and the many think tanks in their orbit, you'll probably find yourself nodding sagely as you read this story by Thomas Daigle.

Yup, them darned Ruskies are at it again. Gonna corrupt the 2020 election, just like when they put Trump in the White House four years ago, and it sounds like this Professor Chossudovsky chap is neck-deep in collusion with Bad Vlad.

If, on the other hand, you have grown wise to the lies peddled by NATO, State, and their many affiliated think-tanks, then you're probably aware that the odds of reading spin, misinformation, and outright bullshit are about the same at CBC News as they are at Global Research.

Which is not to deny there is Kremlin-sponsored disinformation out there. It is merely to suggest that we need to be at least as vigilant when we're reading Washington-sponsored disinformation. In fact, the lies that our own leaders tell us represent a far more insidious threat to our freedoms than the lies of our adversaries.  

We can build a Haldron Collider but we can't build a better mousetrap

Over the summer, our mouser, Doublewide, put quite the dent in the local chipmunk population. We were a little ambivalent about that, but figured it was keeping her hunting instincts sharp for the upcoming indoor mouse-hunting season.

But apparently she considers herself a big-game hunter now, and can't be bothered with mere mice anymore.

Which is how I found myself at the Tractor Supply Company picking up a couple of Rodentex plastic traps this afternoon. I prefer the old-school Victor traps, but between them not making them like they used to, and my essential tremor, it can be quite an adventure to get them baited and set.

Hence these better mouse-traps, at four times the price.

Do they work?

Ya, but they only get the job half done. After thirty seconds the mouse comes to, and walks away with the trap stuck to its head.

Nova Scotia terrorized by tsunami of racist hate

Check out Tiffany Gooch's take on the Indigenous lobster fishery in today's Toronto Star.

Racist hate, hateful racist terror, racist terrorist mobs... holy heck, things have really gone off the rails out there in Nova Scotia!

Luckily for the future of interracial harmony and reconciliation, Liberal strategist Tiffany has got to the bottom of this shit-show and named and shamed the culprits; the racist non-Indigenous (do you mean white, Tiffany?) Indian-hating lobster-men of Nova Scotia and their racist co-conspirators in the RCMP. (I know I've not used the correct nomenclature here, Tiffany, but my research shows that the vast majority of lobster fishers self-identify as "lobster-men," and I therefore use the term as a gesture of respect.)

Here's the thing. The Donald Marshal decision that established Native rights to a "moderate livelihood" was rendered in 1999. For over 21 years the political class has failed to come up with a definition of what that means. For over two decades, our political leadership has stalled, dithered, denied, and delayed moving forward, allowing these tensions to fester. The violence that exploded in the past week was utterly predictable, and is ultimately the result of failed political leadership.

While Tiffany's article oozes faux solidarity with the victims of white oppression in the lobster fishery, she is in fact a member of the political class that has created the nightmare she now blames on racist lobster-men. Harper's Holy Rollers ignored the problem for almost ten years. Liberal governments under Chretien, Paul Martin, and Justin Trudeau have ignored it even longer.

As a "Liberal strategist," Tiffany, I'm sure it feels good pointing fingers at working-class fishers worried for their livelihood, but it's the negligence, incompetence, and arrogance of the people we look to for leadership that is responsible for having created this toxic environment in the first place.

America's three existential threats

None of them are called Russia, China, or Iran. The three existential threats are the climate change crisis, the pandemic, and systemic racism. Of the three, the climate crisis has been with us the longest.

You saw the first stirrings back in the sixties, and you must admit that as "crises" go, this one's proven itself to have impressive legs. It's gone a long way from the initial concerns of climate experts over how we're fouling our nest with our pollution, to global warming, to climate change, to species decline, to the extinction rebellion, and even though we've been distracted, this one will come back and wipe us off the planet if the other existential threats don't do us in first.

Then back in January the pandemic reared its head. This completely new virus, unlike anything previously known to humanity, has laid waste to long-term care homes around the world, snuffing the lives of hundreds of thousands, the vast majority of whom would have moved to the proverbial "better place" within months anyway, and forcing us to shut down, at the behest of medical experts, the global economy at the cost of millions of livelihoods and trillions of dollars.

As if that wasn't enough of a body blow to our species, within months social scientists had discovered another pandemic even more insidious than covid; systemic racism. Unlike the old in-your-face non-systemic racism of the bygone era, which manifested as slavery, segregation, and lynchings, this new systemic racism is much more subtle, lying more in the domain of the deadly "micro-aggression."

What do America's three existential crises have in common? Each of them, being the province of experts, is subject to continuous revision and redefinition, because that's how things work in the world 'o experts.

Science evolves, don't you know! 

And because science, even social science, evolves, you can be bloody sure that by the time humanity devises a fix for any of these malicious maladies, the threat itself will have "evolved," making our remedies irrelevant, and sending the experts back to the drawing board...

It's a vicious downward spiral. Humanity is doomed.

The academy follows NASCAR and F-1; if you want tenure, bring your own sponsors

Let's say you've got a youngster keen on gaining a tenure track position. He/she's got a gaggle of post-grad degrees from the finest schools, and is eminently qualified for that tenure track post at a top institution.

Unfortunately, there are at least 101 equally qualified candidates available for every tenure track position.

It's an embarrassment of riches for the university. Which candidate will pass muster?

The candidate who ticks all the boxes?

Or the candidate who ticks all the boxes, and their uncle just endowed a chair in the economics department to the tune of fifty million dollars?

Hmm...

It's a lot like Lance Stroll and his F-1 career. Lance can obviously drive a F-1 car, but is there a serious person on the planet who imagines that he'd be driving one if Daddy wasn't rich? 

RIP Boomer, 2004-2020

Had a picture of the old girl having a last slurp of water out of Colpoy's Bay on the way to the vet for her last appointment.

It doesn't seem to want to load. Maybe in the fullness of time...

Boomsie had a great run. She was everything you'd ever want in a hound, and then some.

We will miss her.

UN goes full commie

 Get a load of this headline; China, Russia and Cuba win spots on UN Human Rights Council.

Notice how America's most loyal allies, Canada and the Marshall Islands, are excluded. Oh baby, the fix is in!

What can the UN possibly be up to? Surely it is beyond obvious to every sentient human being that America represents the very pinnacle of human endeavour. So why elevate this disgusting gaggle of enemies of freedom and democracy to the Human Rights Council?

What's next? Venezuela and Nicaragua on the UN Security Council?

If there's one thing great about America, it's that even hostile electoral adversaries like Trump and Biden are united in their faith that America is the greatest, the light unto the nations, the shining shitty on a hill, the pinnacle of human achievement, the ....

Hello?..

Hello?

Happy Turkey Day!

 I used to think Canada had thanksgiving early because we had less to be thankful for. They had Elvis and Chuck. We had Paul Anka.

Now I realize I had it back asswards. We celebrate thanksgiving early because we have so much more to be thankful for!

It would have to suck to live down there. It's painful to watch, even at a distance. They seem to be heading into some major turbulence.

Which is completely mind-boggling, because it doesn't matter one iota who wins this election that threatens to unleash a civil war.

The billionaires have won already.

Pot-addled hillbilly knows more about NK war than Canada's Foreign Minister

 Our FM Champagne has stepped up and called out the wily Erdogan.

Stop messing around in Nagorno-Karabakh, or else!

Sure.

First of all, Erdogan isn't just messing around. He's the prime mover.

Secondly, and here's where it's beyond obvious that our humble little democratic corner of the British Empire has faded into complete irrelevance, Erdogan does not in a million years have to give a shit what our FM has to say about the matter.

At this very moment, Erdogan is giving the entire world the finger. What Canada might think or not think isn't even on his radar. If even the Pompeo-Trump combine can't move Erdogan, anything our FM Champagne says means less than nothing.

The only way to end racism

We're hard-wired for racism.

By "we," I mean all of us; black, white, brown, Asian, whatever.

And it's not just us. It's everywhere up and down the evolutionary chain. We are hard-wired to reject those who are "different." 

Because, if there's a threat to the tribe, the flock, the herd... it's gonna come from the ones that are not like the rest.

That's why, when you introduce an outsider chicken to an established flock, they will peck it to death.

Luckily, humans are, at least potentially, smarter than chickens.

I've noticed in my own extended clan, over the last fifty years or so, some evidence that we are indeed smarter than chickens.

We washed up on these shores from eastern Europe, beginning after the WWI. The pioneers mostly settled in New York and New Jersey. By today's standards, all of them were white.

There followed a second wave after the WWII, oddly enough. Most of the second wave ended up in Canada, largely because they were war-sick, and figured their kids would be less likely to be cannon fodder if they grew up in Ontario, rather than in New York or New Jersey. 

Good call!

All of them were white too.

Fast forward to a family get-together sixty years later. Along the way, various family members dilly-dallied with folks quite outside our tribe. I think cousin Thomas was the pioneer in that aspect, having hooked up with a black woman way back in the... seventies?

By now, the family picnic pretty much looks like a mini UN, and the amazing thing is, we're all family!

That's how we're gonna beat racism. You can have all the government blue panels and white papers you want, but at the end of the day, the only way to beat racism is to enlarge the tribe. White gals gotta drop more brown babies. Brown gals gotta drop more white babies, and so on and so forth.

Holy shit, I see a Nobel Peace Prize in these pearls of wisdom...

Alarm bells grow louder as runaway covid train barrels down on Thanksgiving in Ontario

 After reporting the bizarre coincidence of having test numbers and case numbers both spike on the exact same day (see previous post), the CBC wasn't done with scaring the crap out of us.

Here's the "runaway train" headline.

And here's the growing alarm bells.

That's at least the third fear-mongering covid story on CBC news today. You don't think they're deliberately trying to spread fear, do you?

Neither of these stories are news, they are entirely speculative. The actual information they contain could readily be delivered without the sensationalism of alarm bells and runaway trains.

It is possible that those who come up with the scary headlines intend them to have a cautionary effect. Perhaps people will be more careful after reading them.

Perhaps, but I think it's more likely that the fear-mongering is intended to keep the populace frightened, and therefore more pliable than they otherwise might be. 

"Ontario reports record-high Covid-19 cases, also sets testing record"

No shit!

That's a headline on view at CBC News this morning.

Who can even imagine such a thing? You do a record number of tests and find a record number of cases?

Unbelievable!

Shocking!

Check out this quote:

The testing record comes as the province pushes towards its goal of processing 50,000 tests daily by the middle of October, and more than 75,000 per day by mid-November.

Let me go out on a limb here and make a prediction. I'm no expert, but I have a hunch, a "gut feeling" as it were, that as Ontario continues to ramp up testing, we'll continue to see a rising case count.

Grey-Bruce bumpkins beat The Virus

Check this out from the Toronto Star. It's not every day that we get props from national media. 

Congratulations Grey-Bruce! 

It sounds like we have a first-rate guy at the top of the health unit. Thank-you, Dr. Arra! You're worth every cent of your 30k/monthly salary!

When you get accolades from a community where a lot of folks are getting by on 30k/year, you're obviously doing something right.

Aside from having a competent guy at the top, we've also got a robust population. We have a lot of people who spend a lot of time outside and always have, which would mean healthy immune systems. There's also a lingering ethos of resiliency left over from the old days. We're not folks who run for a covid test every time we sneeze.

That's all fine and good, but we can't rest on our laurels. They keep telling us the second wave is gonna be here any day now...

Is there a market for previously vaped pot?

I asked that question of Junior when I got my first vaporizer a few years ago, because he's way more knowledgeable on this stuff than I am. 

He figured that was a bit of a stretch. 

But I asked Google the same question, and I came up with all sorts of stuff. 

First of all, it's got its own acronym!

AVB.

Stands for "already vaped bud." Who knew?

Anyway, there's a whole lotta great suggestions out there, everything from cooking and baking to making custom blunts. 

The possibilities are endless! 

You'll never get a fair "new deal," green or otherwise, from the same old ruling class

Unless they feel a little heat.

I'm not talking about the heat created by the rioting mobs. All that's going to do is bring down the wrath of the police state. 

As corrupted and dishevelled US democracy may be, it's still, so far, got the machinery of democracy in place. There remains the possibility of using that machinery for good, instead of leaving it in the hands of the corporate political professionals. That's how OAC got into Congress.

It takes a lot of grassroots work to overcome the advantage the billionaires bring to the fray.

Money.